Ensemble Musikfabrik, Steffen Schleiermacher, Kaija Saariaho, Michael Wertmüller

Sturm (Storm) brings three kinds of weather into the Edition Musikfabrik: a ritual chant turned into a roar, Shakespeare's The Tempest as a songbook, and a head-on collision between free jazz and new music. The last of these features the saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, one of the central figures of European free jazz, as soloist with the full ensemble. The pieces by Steffen Schleiermacher and Michael Wertmüller appear here in their first recordings.

Ensemble Musikfabrik recorded the three works live between 2009 and 2014 in the Klaus-von-Bismarck-Saal of the WDR Funkhaus in Cologne, in a production of Westdeutscher Rundfunk. Jean Deroyer, Emilio Pomàrico and Christian Eggen conduct. The singers in the Saariaho are the soprano Olivia Vermeulen and the baritone Peter Schöne. In the Wertmüller, Brötzmann is joined by the ensemble's percussionist Dirk Rothbrust on drum kit and Marino Pliakas on electric bass.

Schleiermacher wrote Das Tosen des staunenden Echos (The Roar of the Astonished Echo, 2009) for Musikfabrik. Its paradox of a "roaring stillness" unfolds in a kind of cantus firmus that echoes ritual recitations from Laos, passes among the instruments and builds towards a forceful finale. Kaija Saariaho's The Tempest Songbook takes its words from Shakespeare in five songs: "Ariel's Hail" and "Miranda's Lament" for soprano, "Caliban's Dream" and "Prospero's Vision" for baritone, and "Ferdinand's Comfort" for both. The small ensemble includes harp, guitar and mandolin. In Wertmüller's antagonisme contrôlé (2013-14) the storm lies in the form itself: a trio from free jazz builds a high-pressure system against the headwind of the full ensemble.

Wertmüller, a Swiss composer born in Thun in 1966, is also a drummer and has played for years with Brötzmann and Pliakas in the trio Full Blast. Brötzmann (1941-2023), from Wuppertal, died four years after this release. In MusicWeb International Richard Hanlon found the Schleiermacher "loud and brash in the main, but never harsh or inaccessible", and praised "the honeyed lightness" of Vermeulen's voice in the Saariaho. He disliked the Wertmüller. The booklet poster reproduces Gerhard Richter's Rot-Blau-Gelb (1973).

CD in digipak with fold-out poster, Wergo WER 6868 2, released in 2019 in the Edition Musikfabrik (61'32").